10 Terrific Testing Tips

Are you basing copy and design changes on your gut feeling? STOP! There is a better way to optimize your website.

:: By Lars Johansson ::

By using a tool for A/B and multivariate testing, you
can see what your visitors prefer and let the numbers
speak. This allows you to find out what website tweaks
make your visitors take action and increase sales.
Don’t have a tool for testing? There are numerous
tools from which to choose but I recommend that you
first try Google Website Optimizer. It is free (get it
here: http://goo.gl/hnid), and with it, you can find out
what features you really need and which are just nice
to have.

When you get started with testing, you need to
keep some important guidelines in mind.

Remember that “best practice” is somebody
else’s practice

You can look at what others have been doing successfully,
but don’t assume what worked for them will
work for you. Depending on your audience and context,
results will vary. For example, some experts say
that one-step forms are always more efficient, whereas
others claim that multi-step forms are superior. So
who’s right? Well, they are equally right and equally
wrong. Tests have found that sometimes one-step
forms work better, and sometimes multi-step forms
do. Don’t assume. Test what works best for your
audience and context. And if someone says that red buttons are better than purple ones, don’t believe
them. There is no universally superior button color
but you might want to test contrasting colors.

Be bold and break rules

You might have heard about Google testing 41 shades
of blue for the toolbar on Google pages but unless
you work for Google, forget about it. Minor changes
will typically lead to minor improvements, and to find
out if those minor improvements are statistically
valid, you will need massive amounts of traffic. If you
want results, you will need to make more drastic
changes than that. You will often have to bend, if not
break company design guidelines in order to achieve
substantial improvements. While doing so, it’s important
to work closely with brand managers, so you
do not step on anyone’s toes. Examples of what to test
include images, tone and functionality.

Don’t be greedy (limit your test)

Unfortunately, not everyone has the benefit of large,
steady streams of visitors, and traffic volumes may
limit you to running an A/B split test. Maybe you
think changing the primary headline, main copy text,
an image, call-to-action and a button will improve conversions. Do not, however, test all the changes at
once in a single A/B test if you want to know what
exactly causes the improvement (if any) and to find
the best combination (for example, what call to action
works best with which image). In the previous
example, there are five page sections (elements) with
two variations each. They make 32 possible combinations.
If you run that as an A/B test, you will have
no idea what made the difference.

Calculate estimated time to completion

It is possible to create a test that will take years to end.
Say you have six elements and three variations per element,
your test page gets 5,000 page views per day,
your conversion rate is 4 percent, and you expect an
improvement of 10 percent. That multivariate test
would take 30 years to complete even if you include
all visitors in your test. Use a duration calculator to
find out whether the test you’re planning to run is actually
reasonable. Google’s calculator can be found at
http://goo.gl/g8VQ.

Assess risks

While you might think of testing as gambling, rest assured
that the odds are on your side. What you risk
is a smaller amount of conversions in the short term,
but what you can gain is an overall increase of conversions
in the long run. Even when your hypothesis
turns out to be wrong, you will learn something —
how to avoid making costly mistakes in the future.
To minimize risks, you might wish to expose a
smaller share of your visitors to the test. But bear in
mind that if fewer visitors are included, the test will
take longer to complete.

Validate your implementation

Before your test goes live, make sure to test implementation.
Factors that could skew results include
the prevalence and accuracy of test scripts (for instance,
ensure that the goal script is implemented
only on the actual goal page) and the loss of referral
data. Some tools, Google Website Optimizer included,
automatically validate the test for you. Do not
blindly trust this because it is possible for your
implementation to be flawed regardless of what the
automatic validation indicates.

Avoid conflicting tests

If you set up two or more simultaneous tests sharing
the same goal, you risk inaccurate results. Say you
want to increase conversions by running one test to
find out what headline works best, and a second test
to find out which image works best. The two tests
won’t share data, so you won’t know to which combination of image and headline a converting visitor
has been exposed. If running several tests, make sure
they won’t add noise and uncertainty to each other.

Look out for side effects

Wanting improvement is good. Being too eager to
achieve results can, however, inadvertently lead to
making costly mistakes — ones that are difficult to
spot, too. While changes might increase conversions
for one goal, they could decrease conversions for another.
Typically a test is set up for only one goal. If
running an A/B test with Google Website Optimizer,
use Google Analytics and custom variables to “tag”
visitors. Then you will be able to find out how other
goals and general visitor behavior are impacted by your
test and its different variations. (Read more about the
use of custom variables at http://goo.gl/NjLV.) It’s also
possible to include the goal script for Google Website
Optimizer on multiple goal pages. But if you do that,
both goals will be summed up together, and you won’t
know the performance of each individual goal.

Try segmented testing

The standard way of running a test assumes that one
size fits all. While running any test is better than
not testing at all, it is possible that one alternative or
combination is better for direct traffic and another is
better for traffic from Google AdWords (just an example).
Therefore, viewing the results for different
segments will give you deeper insights. You can use
custom variables to keep track of variations in Google
Analytics and advanced segments to see how the different
variations performed for different segments. You
can also have a look at page 25 in The Techie Guide for
Google Website Optimizer (http://goo.gl/oXr7) or find
a tool more suitable for segmented testing at
www.whichmvt.com.

Challenge the winner

So you’ve reached a statistically valid result of a test
and announced the winner. Are you done now? No.
Testing is not a one-time practice. Rather, it should
be part of your process for continuous improvement.
It’s not only possible but likely that a variation will
perform even better than the winner. That’s why a
winner should be challenged from time to time. At
some point, there will always be a new winner.

Before going for usability testing for your website, make sure that you are confidant of your website's design and user interface first. You can minimize the time and number of faults that appear first. I think it is important to get input from the whole team about the design of the website first, because if it is able to please multiple people, you have a higher chance of it being a successful design.